Fuzzysquid


career
downloads
about

delicious
photos
/ Main

As with a low sucking sound it slowly disappeared again, Starbuck still gazing at the agitated waters where it had sunk, with a wild voice exclaimed—“Almost rather I had seen Moby Dick and fought him, than to have seen thee, thou white ghost!”
      “What was it, Sir?” said Flask.
      “The great live squid, which, they say, few whale-ships ever beheld and returned to their ports to tell of it.”

Moby-Dick, 1851


NEWS



3-17-09  No one reads this column
Guys, FURL sucks. It has sucked for years, and I'm sorry I've been using it. I have switched over to delicious; I would have done this much sooner, but they made it really difficult the last time I tried.


4-21-08  Archives
Uhmm, apparently archives haven't really been working since late 2006. THANX for the heads up guys! They are temporarily fixed, and will stay temporarily fixed until I migrate to new software/layout. I have said some hilarious things in the last 7 years, that future generations will feel lucky I preserved. Go check them out.


1-18-08  new iPhone icon
Woah, it's been 3 years since the last news update! Fuzzysquid now has a webclips icon for your iPhone! It'll automagically show up when you add FS to your home screen. Atom and RSS feeds have been available for a few years now, but I never made special mention of it.


1-14-05  LJ images
Since it seems to be popular, and it's been linked in a lot of different places besides here, I've decided to post the LJ Images page. At least in the news, at least for now. It's also getting some Google ads because you LiveJournal people are sucking up all my bandwidth (35% for that one page!)


4-02-04  FURL
Check out what I've been browsing: FURL.net bookmark archive. Not much commentary, relevance, or sequitur—but it's what's keeping this blog from turning into a meme dumpster.





LINKS

    SQUID STUFF

  1. TONMO - The Octopus News Magazine Online. Invaluable.
  2. Angrywhale - Meet Leonard. He's an angry sort of whale.
  3. The Squid Blog - From the Laughing Squid people.



    PEOPLE I KNOW

  4. Moxyberry - Where the cousin is at. Her bookmarks here.
  5. Cranky User - Brian's bookmarks. Updated, unlike his site.
  6. Rosenstock - Her other ride is your mom.
  7. Lauren - Wet Hot Singaporean Blogging.
  8. Universal Donor - Like the prime number shitting bear, but with terrible back pain.
  9. Olivia - Who receives special dispensation from our usual policies.
BLAG  read the archive


Monday, September 25, 2006
dannyboy 9:40 AM (1)

 
Comments:

 

This cultural mindset about helping rather than outlawing the homeless is one of the reasons I think it'd be interesting to live in a European or Scandinavian country someday.



 

 
When I was in school I jokingly lamented the inability of designers to be crooked, the way engineers, architects and a lot of other professions can. I was willing to sell out my ethics for a payoff! But a poorly designed train schedule isn't going to hurt anyone, so no one is willing to pay for it. Well, you know what I'm saying.

Then today on my way to work I thought about the people who designed the bus shelters in San Francisco—they have flippy seats (like in stadiums, except they're just a very narrow, flat slab) to prevent homeless people from sleeping on them. Yes, perhaps there are other considerations, but American society is one in which designers actually are paid to be unethical. Like the famous IDEO shopping cart design that makes it useless for homeless people to steal, and the subsequently produced, much less elegant version we actually see in supermarkets today. I understand that shopping carts are expensive, ludicrously so, but Americans live in a place that has outlawed destitution, and is actively designing away (trying to, anyway) the existence of undesirables. Contrast this with the Cafe Gulliver project (terrible English translation here) in which a group of students from the Köln International School of Design set out to redesign a train station bathroom. Their research led them to conclude that the main users of the incredibly disgusting facility were tourists and the homeless; their response was to create Cafe Gulliver, where it offers the homeless low-cost food, showers, washing machines, internet access and a mailing address. Oh right, and dignity. They also, are trying to design away homelessness. I think their approach will work better in the long run.

Dostoevsky said that the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons; I seem to remember something Jesus said about being judged by how we treat the least among us. Can you imagine anything like that happening in a NYC subway station? I think designers are often the only ethical voice in the business process, and we actually do have the obligation not to be crooked, just as engineers have the obligation to build bridges that don't collapse and kill people. So again I lament being a pixel pusher, but now for the opposite reason—it's not easy to change the world with visual design.





 
   
Fuzzysquid Design is copyright © 1961 Josef Müller-Brockman / weblog by / atom + rss